The Aesthetics of Linguistic Divergence: Defamiliarization in Contemporary Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how Chinese avant-garde writers, Yu Hua in particular, use style as deviation as an effective postmodernist language medium to achieve a new defamiliarizing blasphemy against the established norm and to combat the accepted notion of secular reality by attempting to confine them to the sheer verbal surface of a text. The avant-garde pursuit of stylistic eccentricity, along with the transcendent nature of language, endows these writers with an amazing linguistic irony or capacity to both subvert the mainstream world and to estrange the familiar with creative deformation.